no my post was not all over the place. 1] my comp was working fine till I messed up the partitions. 2] I bought the recovery disks to do a factory restore. 3 and 4] every hp recovery set I have ever seen is either 2 or 3 disks. and no I did not buy the media center edition. not trying to change the os, just hoped when the xp disk did not work that the win 7 would. 5] I guess now we are talking about both? 6] you must not of seen a lot of oem comps because a lot of dell, hp and compaqs have setting in bios that controls what os can be installed by recovery disks. It does not effect retail disks. yes the eeprom chip holds the bios. but is not the old type bios like 386,486 and 586 had. 7] refer to 5. 8] I meant having xp on this netbook is fine with me and by oem disks I mean the recovery disks that loads the os with all the drivers and hp programs. i.e in this case the recovery disks. again NO the xp home sp3 is not installed. I am trying to install it from the recovery disks. Allready told you if you would read. 210-1000 cto pc. I know you understood becuase you posted a link to it. It has no os right now. if I could combine the wims I could copy it to my recovery partition and use the F11 function. But I have read a lot about it and still do not understand how to do it. Thank you for your replies though.